Posts from the ‘Interviews’ Category

"Well there’s several levels of building resilience. So one thing that our current code handles very comprehensively is that a building be resilient enough that after an event, people can get out of it safely. They can safely evacuate. So generally that’s defined as 90 minutes, maybe two hours. What makes the resiliency effort different for New York City is that we’re trying to lengthen the amount of time that the building could be habitable so that people are not forced to evacuate. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One is people do not like to leave their homes—they’re worried about looting, they’re worried about safety, they don’t have places to go. So they like to stay home. And we saw after Sandy, a lot of people living in unsafe conditions because they did not want to leave. Second, the city only has limited capability to actually shelter people—you know, at shelters—and so the more people you can keep in a building, you know, the easier it is for the city to handle the people that really don’t have any option. So one level is just the emergency egress and just getting out safely. Another level might be what we call survivability."

"When I first started, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks. Now it's more feeling it's going to be over a year at least. I'd like to see people getting back into their houses feeling more comfortable coming and getting the services that we're offering. But the numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And that's kind of eye opening...we are not back to normal and everyone thinks we are. They think that the storm is past and the damage should be over. And there's houses in this community that haven't even been touched yet. And there's, you know, people just starting the cleaning process. And it's six months later, so now they're tackling mold and mildew and a lot of other issues that we didn't think existed prior."

"I think it was a testament to New Yorkers’ perseverance that folks who could make it through and try to get on with their daily lives really did and it's also, I think it was a great example of the diversity of transportation choices in the city that makes the city great. Because New York has so many ways of getting from A to B it makes the city more resilient which is a great lesson from the storm that we're not just wed to a car or to the subways, that when something goes down we have a backup plan."

" I'm trying to remember from social media my perception at the time. The only thing that comes to mind specifically is the sort of the needs hashtag that had come up that I think was effective at both highlighting needs and also getting people to respond to those needs. And I think I was surprised by the effectiveness of the hashtag in doing that because a hashtag can be a pretty blunt tool given that anybody can use it for any purpose that has nothing to do with the hashtag itself. And it's also very limited in terms of how much data it can contain in a tweet, for example. But I was pretty impressed with how that was able to manage so much of the communication load in a very informal way."

"We have the Verrazano Center Rotary Club is working with us. We have the Red Cross was able to give us a couple -- a truck full of assistants. City Harvest is going to work with us also bringing us material and food, a lot of food for the families. Last -- we have been providing food at an average of 100 families per day. And we do give on a weekend, you know like, on a Saturday easily we could give 250, 300 boxes of food to the people. And interestingly enough people are still learning that we are here so we are still getting a lot of new people that didn’t know that we were here."

"Because I learned from my mother to make the light with olive oil and water, the transformers were going boom, boom, boom. My granddaughter said to me, grandma, grandma put your bathing suit on, put your bathing suit on. She said we’re gonna go swimming grandma -- I said I am praying, I am praying. You know and then I applied for FEMA and they said because I have high blood pressure and I have -- I was diagnosed with -- I was in the hospital I was going crazy, I don’t have no -- I didn’t have no medication I couldn’t do anything."

"Spaces where it was free reign, where the community could organize what it needed, as it needed, seem to create the opportunity for resiliency and health. Here with the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, there with churches -- mostly churches and like a couple of businesses. I've never thought so well of churches. ... The thing that the churches gave to us was space to organize and assess our needs and then deliver upon them. And there are no other spaces like that, no other spaces like that."

"One of the things we've been starting to explore is helping to develop worker cooperatives because there are so many unemployed people with skills ... I'm really excited about the opportunity to give- to create jobs for people, to create a livelihood that doesn't involve the existing system and doesn't involve people being exploited by people, people making opportunities for themselves."

"And it was pretty frightening, because a disaster takes place and an inevitable outcome is that a lot of organizations that don’t normally communicate with each other are going to communicate with each other, which is abide by the nature of a disaster."

"So they went in, they opened the doors, people immediately came in to start charging their phones and figure out what was going on, and both people who were living in the neighborhood and in the houses came in, and then volunteers, who were I think literally biking around the neighborhood looking for a place to help, found our doors being open, and so pretty quickly people started cooking, dropping off supplies, different kinds of providers showed up, and because we had this physical space, and because we had a staff that was local, and because we had a social media presence, we were pretty quickly at the—at the center of a lot of different supply and demand."

"My job specifically was to deal with the email address that everyone emailed for questions. So I was working, like, from seven in the morning--I'm not kidding--seven in the morning to, like, two in the morning every night for two weeks. Like I didn't leave my house. …So the emails that were coming in were like anywhere from “how can I help” to “you guys aren't doing enough,” to [laughter]…to “I have a truck load of shit from Ohio; how can I get it to you?” But also we would get these frantic emails from people, like “my uncle's in a wheelchair on the twenty-fifth floor in Chinatown, and I'm worried about him, and I can't get down there because I have kids.'"

About our interviews

Collecting a robust set of social scientific interviews is critical to our work, and with interviewee consent we will post transcripts on the website public research. We will be collecting data throughout the fall and winter so please keep checking back for new material.

With the interviewee's consent, our interviews are licensed under Creative Commons (Share and Share Alike, with attribution). More information about this can be found in the footer of every transcript.

Some of these interviews are edited by the interviewee or interviewer for clarity, or to protect names and identities.

Interviews that are not publicly posted online are available to researchers under certain circumstances. Most of the interviews in this category are with government officials at city, state and federal levels. If used, this material can be quoted and used for background knowledge, but must remain anonymous and protect the anonymity of interviewees. If you are interested in accessing this material, please email SRL with the following information: 1) your name and institutional affiliation 2) the IRB number and clearance for your project, or, if you are not in academia, an ethical research statement. 3) A one-paragraph research description. Send to David Wachsmuth at dwachsmuth[at] gmail [dot] com.

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Superstorm Research Lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This data may be shared, copied, distributed and used free of charge provided you attribute the source of the data to Superstorm Research Lab within the work you produce.If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one (Creative Commons, CopyLeft, or Open Source), meaning the work must remain free, open, and the data must be attributed to SRL.

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